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It’s Shabbat Hagadol again, the “Great Shabbat” that precedes the seder, and time for my annual plea to make this year’s seder something worthy of being called great. No one knows exactly why this anticipatory Shabbat is called “great” – the term appears first in the Gospel of John (of all places) and no Jewish source uses it until the Middle Ages, by which time, no one knew any more what it meant. Among the possibilities, however, is the realization that it precedes the greatest holiday in our calendar: Passover, which gave us our birth as a People and introduced freedom from slavery as a supreme value for all humanity.

Unless we rise from our annual seder convinced of Passover’s “greatness,” we miss the mark. It must echo with this year’s news, not just antiquity’s events. The “Great Shabbat” was established to rehearse the Haggadah in advance, anticipating moments for our seder to make old words sound entirely new.

Just think of all change that our Haggadah has undergone in attempts to retain its freshness. Originally, there was no printed text at all – in an oral age, people made it up as they went along. Originally too, there were three, not four cups of wine, and some rabbis even added a fifth cup, because the ones they had represented God’s acts of deliverance in the past, but they wanted a cup to remain unconsumed on the table unless God appeared to save us once again. By the late Middle Ages, that became an Elijah’s Cup. And nowadays, some people have added a Miriam’s Cup as well.

The meal didn’t come only half way through the night either. People ate first, originally, using the foods to prompt discussion. When people began to “eat and run,” however, the meal was postponed to make hungry diners sit through the discussion before satisfying their appetites.

There were not four questions originally either; and a child did not ask them until the Middle Ages. Since people ate first, children asked genuine questions prompted by the meal. Our “four questions” are just rabbinic examples of what to say to a child who cannot think of anything to ask. Without a meal coming first, and with nothing to prompt a child’s curiosity, these became standardized questions that children delivered by rote, the way we do today.

No one sang Dayyenu in the early years either. It was still optional in the tenth century.

At first, the Seder’s high point was an opaque midrash about some “wandering Aramean” who was worse than Pharaoh. Traditional seders still have that midrash, although those who say it are unlikely to know that it was a veiled reference to Roman domination – change the vowels and the Hebrew aRaMi (Aramean) becomes RoMi (Roman). After the Crusades, a new climax was added: opening the door for Elijah, and hoping for the messiah. “Next year in Jerusalem!” we began saying.

A slew of new Haggadahs appear annually about now. Some are just glitzier rewrites of the old; others provide commentary with contemporary interpretations; some update our story to reflect the realities of slavery still rampant round the world. More than a new Haggadah, however, consider the need to be a genuine leader of the seder, not just its facilitator. Ask people for a new question that we ought to be considering. Take time for them to express what slaveries they feel, what freedom might look like this year.

Feel free to skip readings that make little sense to you. The book we use for a holiday of freedom should not be oppressive! The point of the seder is not its readings but its message: the Jewish People’s mission is to see a world redeemed from degradation.

Do whatever you can to apply that message to our time. Just rereading the same old script of the centuries may get the word out; but only pausing to make the script come alive we get the message through.

Synagogues should be asking, “What business are we in?” That may seem obvious, but it isn’t, and most synagogue leaders get it wrong – with disastrous consequences.

The usual answers are things like Jewish education, Shabbat and holiday services, social action, or even all of the above, in the tried and true triad of religion: Torah (study) avodah (prayer) and g’milut chasadim (good deeds).

Religion may be what we do, however; it is not our business. The two are not the same.

The question arises compellingly in Peter Drucker’s 1954 classic, The Practice of Management. Drucker’s 1950s example is Cadillac. What it did was manufacture cars; its business, however, was not automobiles but status. Recognizing its business aright led to the realization that its competitors were not Chevrolet and Ford but high fashion and diamonds.

So what is the synagogue’s business?

During the years following World War II, we were in the continuity business. We had lost 6,000,000 and Israel was beleaguered. Challenged by anti-Semitism without and assimilation within, synagogues implicitly guaranteed Jewish continuity. So too did UJA and Federations, but explicitly, and when they proved better at raising huge sums of money to build up Israel and rescue Jews from the Soviet Union, they surpassed synagogues as the dominant Jewish organization. Wrongly so, synagogues complained, thinking the proper Jewish business was study, prayer and good deeds. Rightly so, said average Jews – whose passion was saving Jewish lives and who belonged to synagogues mostly to educate their children, another sign that what they wanted to invest in was continuity, not religion.

What made continuity our business was the fact that the customers (the rank and file Jews) wanted it enough to “buy” it. The business is not necessarily what the entrepreneurs running the show think it is. It is what the customers want. And from the 1950s to the 1990s, the fear of Jewish discontinuity was enough to galvanize the troops.

It isn’t any more, much as Jewish leaders may wish otherwise. Lots of Jews identify as Jews but not enough to insist on raising Jewish children, paying for Jewish education, supporting Jewish causes, and joining Jewish synagogues. Continuity is no longer a sufficient business to be in – not if we want to stay in business.

But neither is religion – not by itself, that is. Witness the Pew study where people increasingly say they are not religious, even though they may spiritual.

Still, religion deserves a closer look, not for what it is but for what it delivers. In the post War years, it succeeded as long as it delivered continuity. What does it (or can it) deliver now?

Religion was once what sociologist Peter Berger famously called the Sacred Canopy — the overarching reality that drove everything people did. To abandon your religion was to trade in the very essence of who you were. Not any more, however. A moment’s observation reveals that religion has become discretionary – what we do (if we wish) with our discretionary time, money and attention. I attend Sabbath services; you play golf; she gardens. I drop $3,000 as synagogue dues; you join the country club; he buys season tickets at the Met. I go to Torah study, you attend lectures on art; others take classes in American history.

Like it or not, that’s just the way it is.

But not all discretionary activity is of the same consequence to consumers. Movie-going on the odd Saturday night ranks lower than what we can call “committed pursuits,” the discretionary choices we make about matters of commitment. In the good old days when religion was a sacred canopy we knew who we were: we were Jewish or Lutheran, or Catholic or Episcopalian. Without a sacred canopy, it is not clear just what counts as our identity.

When the canopy first began to unravel (with the advent of modernity), people thought nationalism would take its place: and for many, it has. We pay taxes to, obey the laws of, and are most dependent on our countries. But the wars of the twentieth century showed us just how horribly, terribly, wrong nation states can become. “Moral man” is subject to “immoral society,” warned Reinhold Neibuhr way back in 1932. So as much as we may value national citizenship as primary, we hesitate to adopt as the deepest motto of our identity, “My country right or wrong.”

And, in any event, with the religious canopy gone, we have room for multiple identities, not just our nationality: I may be an American, a Jew, a professor, and a serious violinist; you may be an American and Jew, but also a feminist, judge, and artist. Whatever we say we “are” requires the committed allocation of discretionary time, money and attention.

Synagogues compete for these resources, the symbolic tokens of people’s inner identities. We are ultimately in the identity business. The Age of Continuity has become The Age of Fractured Identity.

A great deal follows, most particularly, how synagogues make themselves known to the world. Synagogues in the Age of Continuity advertised programs that would keep Jews Jewish: a better religious school, a guaranteed bar/bat mitzvah, or Sunday afternoon lectures on Israel. In the Age of Fractured Identity, these still matter, but for different reasons. If identity is the issue, we need most to demonstrate that we are a serious candidate for people’s deepest selves, their aspirations to matter, their pursuit for meaning, and their desire not to have lived and died in vain.

As it turns out, religion is profoundly (even uniquely) suited to this venture. That’s why synagogues matter more now than ever.

“Collusion” is usually a dirty word denoting police brutality, government corruption, corporate price-fixing, and everyone on the take. But collusion can equally describe the unsung cooperative venture that is life itself: how plants absorb carbon dioxide and exchange it for oxygen, allowing humans to breathe oxygen and give carbon dioxide back, for instance. All of life is about giving and getting in happy collusion.

The Torah calls it sacrifice, and devotes a whole book of Torah to it. We miss the point if we think this week’s Torah reading (the beginning of Leviticus) introduces just a picayune and lengthy treatment of how to offer animals on an altar that has not existed since the Romans destroyed it almost two thousand years ago.

Moses’ opening instruction provides a broader picture: “When you offer a sacrifice from yourselves to God….” The peculiar placement of mikem (“from yourselves”) implies more than the rote offering of animals. Sacrifice can be anything, as long as you really own it, says Ibn Ezra; better still, it must be something “from within yourself.”

The point is this: we study the sacrifices not because we expect to offer up animals again, but because sacrifice is only tangentially about animals in the first place. On a deeper level, it is about the human passion to give up even what we hold dearest, if our doing so will further life’s larger purposes. It is about self-sacrifice or it is about nothing.

Other animal species sacrifice themselves also, but only through instinct. We humans operate with similar instincts, but having stretched the instinct into conscious choice, we need guidance on how to make our choices. How do we know when self‑sacrifice is in order?

If you think that is an easy question, think through all the bad “Jewish mother” jokes that revolve around Mother’s stereotypical desire to sacrifice herself unduly. (“How many Jewish mothers does it take to change a light bulb? None; “I’ll just sit in the dark.”) Studies of Jewish culture do demonstrate that Jews have been taught to give, not to receive, and to that extent, there is some truth to the humor. Though a caricature, it reflects the possibility that not all self-sacrifice is desirable.

The thing is, sacrifice is a fancy word for “gift.” It requires a giver and a receiver. What happens if you spend the day cooking a beautiful dinner for the family, but the family runs off for evening activities without bothering to eat it? How do you feel if you choose a birthday present for the one you love, only to find it lying around unused and unappreciated for months afterward. So this opening reading of Leviticus cautions further, “The person bringing the sacrifice should offer it up according to his will before God.” But whose will are we describing here, the giver’s or God’s?

The likely answer is, “Both!” Sacrifice works only when giver and receiver are in collusion.

The key may be the rabbinic concept of et ratson. Et means time; but what is et ratson – literally, “a time of will,” a time that is propitious, presumably? But what is that, if not a time when two wills intersect? It takes a relationship to establish et ratson, a moment when two wills intersect so that gifts become gifts to both giver and receiver.

I have practically made a career of saying that for American Jews, at least, the secular and ethnic option is dead or dying. Some of my best friends disagree with me. Secular Jews themselves, they draw on the same sources I do to make their point – classic sociology, for example, which demonstrates conclusively that identity is much deeper than belief systems, so that if Judaism were to go the route of becoming fully a religion, it would also go the route of liberal churches that lost their ethnicity a long time ago and are now a faint echo of their original selves. The decline of mainline Protestants by fully a fifth since 1950 is a serious long term trend. There are still about 20 million of them, mind you. But we Jews — we start out so tiny in the first place!

I have never said, however, that Judaism is only a religion, and insofar as ethnicity means logging time together in all the many ways that produce solidarity of peoplehood, I am all for it. My point, in any case, is not what they (or I) are for (or against); it is the need to face up to what is happening regardless of what we think of it, and what is happening, inevitably and resolutely, is the disappearance of the sort of ethnic solidarity that prior generations enjoyed as a matter of course.

All Americans were once solidly ethnic, even the so-called WASPS (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants), insofar as they maintained the kind of customs and community that marked them off from later arrivals like Italians and Jews. Catholicism was as much Irish or Italian or German as it was Catholic; in the 1890s, for example, German Benedictines in Minnesota fought their Irish bishop in St. Louis because he objected to their steady use of beer (not even the Trappists drink water, their Abbott Wimmer complained) – an ethnic, not a religious, matter.

And the point is: that is all gone now. We Jews are a latecomer to ethnicity’s demise but we are not immune to it.

Need this be the case elsewhere in the world? Perhaps not. It all depends on surrounding society. Canada has a better chance of sustaining Jewish ethnicity because of its multi-culturalism; Argentinian ethnicity is not in trouble. Alas, the presence or threat of anti-Semitism helps!

But here, at least – and eventually in Canada too, I suspect (for reasons I will not go into here) – the ethnicity of peoplehood without profound purpose is doomed. Yiddish is by now a distant memory. Traditional “Jewish” food (really Polish and Russian) is nothing to yearn for and no one is doing the yearning: young Jews eat sushi and go out for beer. Except for Israel, Hebrew never was the language of the folk, and shows no signs of becoming so. If anti-Semitism in America remains low to absent and if Israel continues its current policies, the next generation will not even identify automatically with Israel the way their elders do. I pray that will not happen, of course, but even if it doesn’t, Israel is insufficient to maintain Jewish America.

Finally, our high intermarriage rate (which is not going to go away) means that Jews of the next generation will increasingly be people with no childhood Jewish memories and no obvious reason to maintain Jewish friends, associations, and causes at the expense of non-Jewish ones.

We are not the first to suffer increasing marginalization from Jewish ethnicity. The process set in by the nineteenth century. French intellectual Edmund Fleg virtually gave up on Judaism, trading it in for an education in the western classics. Franz Kafka wrote a letter to his father recalling, “As a young man, I could not understand how, with the insignificant scrap of Judaism you yourself possessed, you could reproach me for not making an effort… to cling to a similar insignificant scrap.” They remained Jewish by identity, because the nineteenth century was saturated by anti-Semitism and racist to its core. But they too looked for something deeper – Kafka in Hasidic lore and Fleg in a combination of the Zionist story and universalistic Jewish values.

To be sure, if “religion” meant simply disembodied belief — a set of doctrines or tenets about God, an afterlife, and such — the ethnicists would have a point. Ever since Emil Durkheim (another alienated Jew), we have known that identity follows from eating together, mixing together, and generally putting in time together with the people one considers one’s own. Proponents of ethnic Judaism are not wrong to advocate a variety of cultural activities that draw Jews together in many institutional venues.

What differentiates my position from theirs is Durkheim’s further point: the decisive nature of ritual, especially religious ritual – most especially (I might add), here in America. When I say religion, I mean all that the ethnicists do, but with regularized ritual affirmations of the transcendent religious purpose justifying and demanding it.

Living in the Third-Republic anti-Catholic France, Durkheim yearned for national ritual to take the place of the established Church’s. One hundred years later, we have seen how nationalist ritual can indeed engender identity, but strong though American nationalism may be, it has built a culture in which religion is still a bedrock. Religions with powerful ritual succeed here, just as Durkheim predicted.

Such rituals require regularity and an inbuilt sense of obligation. They must reach the mind and touch the heart. They convince us of truths we never knew we knew; and retain our loyalty even in the rational aftermath where we wonder once again if we really believe them. They give us purpose, demand that we be our better selves, and root such quotidian pursuits as job and parenthood in a web of deeper meaning.

Our Jewish problem is that for most of us, certainly in non-Orthodox synagogues, our ritual life does none of that. There are exceptions, of course, but by and large, people attend synagogue on the High Holy Days and for a bar or bat mitzvah, but otherwise, go shopping.

When I say religion must be at the center of Jewish life, then, I do not mean some rationalized code of belief. It is not the case that we worship because we believe – huge numbers of people have trouble with disembodied cognitive belief. Rather, we find cogency in those beliefs that come to life through what Durkheim called ritual effervescence.

Only synagogues are capable of providing the healthy life of ritualized Jewish belonging. We require communities rooted in a network of synagogues that offer ritualized engagement with the ultimate promises of Jewish tradition. Neither culturalism nor religious doctrine will succeed on their own. In a post-ethnic era, we need an alternative pathway to solidarity: in America, that pathway is a growing set of synagogues that offer compelling religious ritual for adults.

“Dear kindly Sergeant Krupke, you gotta understand
It’s just our bringin’ upke that gets us out of hand
Our mothers all are junkies, our fathers all are drunks
Golly Moses, naturally we’re punks”

 
When Steven Sondheim wrote these lyrics for West Side Story, he was satirizing the liberalism of the post-war years. The play (and the song) appeared in 1957, just two years after Bill Haley introduced Rock ‘n’ Roll with Rock Around The Clock. Nine years earlier, Dr. Spock (the psychologist, not the Vulcan) had revolutionized child-rearing by insisting that children be treated with affection.

The issue broached by Sondheim goes much deeper, however, than some west -side “punks.” A slew of post-war theorists were on their way to demolishing the Enlightenment notion of human beings as the autonomous agents we think we are. Social-work theory was explaining deviant behavior as an understandable reaction to forces beyond the individual’s conscious processes – a trend that began with Freud. A lesser known influence, rooted largely in Marxism, gave us a giddy glob of “isms” — post-modernism, structuralism, deconstructionism, postcolonialism, and certain strands of feminism, all of them schools of thought that cast doubt on the possibility of any kind of certainty whatever. What once seemed like truths were redeployed just as “narratives,” ways of seeing the world that served certain interests rather than being objective description of facts. These “narratives” attracted less savory titles in the various “isms”: rationalization (Freud), epiphenomena (Marx), discourse (Foucault) and so on.

Meanwhile, scientific materialism was reducing us to reactive animals anyway – human versions of Pavlov’s dogs who might think we had undergone quantum leaps of evolution but who were just a more complex version of the stimulus/response mechanism.

Under the onslaught of these attacks, it seemed we didn’t have to die to decompose. Only our bodies waited that long. The rest of us – the human mind and conscience — were being decomposed already, exposed as mere illusions.

The real issue isn’t whether the West Side Story punks are autonomous agents but whether any of us are. What is the point of religion in a system where we are all just victims of psycho-social forces beyond our control or just bundles of neurons salivating at psychological bells?

What an about-face this is from the Enlightenment’s insistence on human beings as responsible individuals: with rights, reason, and responsibility. We believe we have minds that think, consciences that make moral choices, and souls that somehow define us as we ultimately are. Are any of these ideas salvageable?

We should start by taking seriously the critique that says we are very much the product of forces beyond our ken. We ought similarly to admit that none of the three terms (mind, conscience, soul) are scientific entities – that is, none of them are material objects capable of being affirmed in a laboratory. Indeed, some scientists would reduce all human endeavor to brain function: the exchange of electrical impulses over synapses that separate neurons.

So here’s the question, restated: How can we believe in a “self” with a “mind,” “conscience” and “soul” when social science and philosophy of the last fifty years demolishes personal objectivity and science reduces our sense of human elegance to brain function alone?

The answer lies in understanding the levels at which we regularly speak of complex phenomena. Philosopher John Searle (Minds, Brains and Science, p. 20) uses the example of a desk with a glass of water on it – like the one I am using now. On the one hand, he says, we have the obvious “solidity of the table [and] liquidity of the water.” On the other hand, we know that “actually” (= scientifically), both table and water are made of micro-particles that are neither. Any particular atom of water is not itself “wet,” and the atoms that constitute the desk have more empty space within them than they do solidity. Individually, that is, the micro-articles explain the larger systems that we call desk and water, but reducing the desk and water to their micro-particle essence does not do them justice.

Similarly, if we limit our understanding of human beings to the physicality of our brains, we do the larger system of “selves” an injustice. “Brains” are to people as atoms are to desks and water. When we want a scientific approach to human existence we speak of the way that brains operate within us. But there is still the larger system to account for, the “us” in which our brains function. In that case, we expand the topic to include mind, conscience and soul, each of which says something extra about the larger entity that we label a sentient individual.

As individuals, we are subjects of our own identity, our own story (if you like), the life we lead that someday gets a eulogistic summary by those who remember us. Literary theorist Jonathan Culler (Literary Theory, p. 110) notes the dichotomous way we speak of a person as “subject.” On the one hand, we say we are “subject to” influences – exactly what Freud, Marx and the others have been insisting. On the other hand, when we say that something is the subject of a sentence, we mean it is the independent focal point about which we rightly attribute actions and characteristics. An individual is a subject in both senses: we are indeed formed by influences beyond ourselves; but we are equally autonomous subjects with stories of our own.

Religion is the system of thought and practice that tries to find meaning in the larger systems that we know ourselves to be. It transcends the Freudian or Marxist systems that explain our foibles and our fashions; even as it does the scientific system that describes our brains.

Each system generates its own set of concepts with which to think its topic through. Freud and Marx need rationalization and epiphenomenon. Brain science needs neurons. Religion needs minds, consciences and souls. The language we choose reflects the system we have in mind. All three systems are real.

Some rabbinic readers have rightly objected that the weight and breadth of their ongoing responsibilities leave little time for regularized pulpit messages that address issues in the depth that I am demanding. They are right, of course – the way things stand. But my point precisely is that we need to make things “stand” some other way. The issue is not the rabbis: it is the system. But the system can change.

Let’s first dissect the objection: the many rabbinic roles that readers have elucidated. Rabbis must be:

1. pastoral (hospital visits, counseling people, and the like);
2. managerial (keeping the place going, supervising staff, and so forth);
3. relational (the endless meetings, usually one on one, that establish loving and lasting relationships with and among members). In addition, they spend endless time with
4. life-cycle events, which have virtually hijacked the synagogue – bar/bat mitzvahs, weddings, funerals, and the like. They also must be
5. liturgical (not just show up for services and go through the motions); and
6. educational (the primary rabbinic task of teaching Torah – to adults and to children); for which, of course, they need, themselves, to practice
7. regularized study of Jewish tradition – not just the weekly sedra, but (ideally) a daf yomi (a page of Talmud daily) or its equivalent in some other Jewish discipline (the latest book on Jewish history or theology, perhaps), Then too there is a role we can call
8. communal, meaning the important task of being a Jewish voice to the public, appearing on panels, and the like – not to mention
9. the purely symbolic (but time consuming) task of going to communal dinners just to put in an appearance. And they need, these days, to have a sense of
10. the programmatic (organizing programs that are not just frontal presentations and that engage people interactively — something their predecessors didn’t worry about).

I could cite other things as well – I limit my breakdown to ten (a Decalogue was enough for the “commandments” so ought to suffice for me). It all varies, of course, depending on congregational size (for example).

The point is, I do understand the way the rabbinic role has grown through time and the impossibilities built into it.

But over and above all of this, there is the task of leadership, something that  transcends mere management. It has aspects that are political, relational, organizational, symbolic, and visionary. “Leadership” is a relative newcomer to rabbinic-school curricula, so most rabbis in the field have never encountered it formally. If rabbis lack anything, it is probably leadership.

Rabbis, however, are not altogether different from corporate CEOs, who also have a ton of tasks but must exercise leadership anyway. Without leadership, we end up drowning in the endless barrage of demands; we run from task to task, without ever setting our own long-term agenda and charting a sustained path to its accomplishment.

Of course there are differences between corporations and synagogues. Synagogues are dependent on volunteers with varying degrees of expertise; synagogue boards encroach on management in ways that corporate boards do not; also synagogues are regularly starved – both for funds and for competent professional personnel; and incompetent personnel cannot easily be fired — we exercise compassion in ways that corporations don’t because our bottom line is not primarily the quarterly financials. I get all of that.

And yet, and yet…

Corporate leaders manage to set aside time to do the visioning, thinking, and imagining that situates the corporation on a course toward a future. Rabbis need to do that too, but for that to happen, both rabbis and their boards have to set priorities among the items that rabbis are expected to do.

I believe some things take priority. Pastoral work may be first: people in crisis, congregants facing pain or even death, grieving families – these need attention. But not necessarily from the senior rabbi all the time! A megachurch pastor tells me that he regularly ponders his church’s mission, but almost never (!) does funerals. His congregants (parishioners) do not expect it. They prefer being eulogized by another pastor whom they know personally. The entire system there is geared to building relationships with other pastors so as to alter expectations of the pastor who leads the entire enterprise.

Second on my list of priorities is a tie between building relationships and managing competently. But there again, rabbis should not have to do it all, even though they have to lead it and inspire it.

My original point, however, is that rabbis also need to think and to speak their minds with gravitas.

To do that, I maintain, they have to renegotiate the implicit contract with the synagogue about what a rabbi is – a matter that almost never even gets discussed. Rabbis are simply held responsible for everything, and they then scurry to do it all – and wonder why they are run down and burned out. Rabbis and lay leaders need conversation about the ultimate nature of the rabbinic role, not for the rabbis’ sakes but for the good of the Jewish People who are shortchanged without serious and ongoing rabbinic attention to the matters that matter.

It’s “the matters that matter” that matter!

Please note also: when I described the pulpit as important, I did not mean  addressing only (!)  the ethical dilemmas of our time, although I surely include them in my prescription. I meant thought in general: conversation on the quality of life and the dignity of the individual; theological issues like the difficulties of believing in God, the purpose behind being Jewish, the reality of the soul (in a way that is consistent with science); and so forth. I mean larger perspectival issues from a Jewish point of view, ways of thinking differently that people can carry with them as  touchstones to finding meaning amid life’s complications.

Pulitzer Prize winning author Doris Kearns Goodwin (The Bully Pulpit, 2013), quotes muckraker journalist Frank Norris at the turn of the 20^th century as saying, “The Pulpit, the Press, and the Novel – these indisputably are the great molders of public opinion and public morals today.” By “pulpit,” Norris meant such preachers as New York’s Harry Emerson Fosdick (1878-1969) whom Martin Luther King Jr. labeled “the foremost prophet of our generation”; and maybe, among rabbis, Stephen S. Wise, who was championing unions even as Norris was busting trusts.

So how did it happen that, at least among Jews, the pulpit voice of conscience has virtually disappeared?

In 1984, conservative Lutheran pastor Richard John Neuhaus bemoaned the absence of a religious voice in what he famously labeled “The Naked Public Square.” He went so far as to predict the end of democracy itself, if national opinion was not enriched by conversation rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition. As we all know by now, conservatives took him up on his challenge, to the point where, as recently as February 15 (“Republicans, the Religious Right and Evolution,” New York Times), Frank Bruni noted assorted fundamentalist lawmakers sounding more like pastors than politicians by arguing against gay marriage and evolution, but for a national day of prayer as a preferred governmental policy to bring the rain required to fight forest fires and droughts.

Liberal religionists, by contrast, hardly ever call for anything, at least not publicly. Instead of learned sermons, rabbis facilitate discussions on the weekly parashah and lead guided meditations to induce Shabbat quiet. Among Reform rabbis anyway, prophetic exhortation has been replaced by pastoral healing, which, for many, is virtually an obsession.

I am all for synagogues with healing prayers, spirituality and relationship-building. Indeed, I helped pioneer them. But things have gone too far.

The healing movement in synagogues must be understood as a critique of the prophetic style, which took root especially in the 1890s as the Jewish parallel to what Christians called “The Social Gospel.” By the 1950s and ‘60s, it morphed into Civil Rights marches and opposition to the Vietnam War. By the ‘70s, the Jewish community was refocusing its efforts inward, a response to the Six-Day War and the Refusenik movement, which directed prophetic zeal to distinctively Jewish causes. But that was it.

Were we just tired out? Had the civil-rights marches, the anti-war movement, the Six-Day War and the fight for Soviet Jews exhausted our will to change the world?

Whatever the cause, old pulpit-centered rabbis were increasingly castigated as cold, distant, and judgmental: a verdict hastened by the growing feminist critique. Rabbis, we said, should be collaborative and pastoral. Synagogues should be warm and welcoming, a kind of “Beit Transactional Analysis: I’m OK, you’re OK.”

Among rabbis themselves, meanwhile, the critique of their elders was personalized with the vow to balance home and job in ways the old guys never had – to make sure to take time off; and to assure mental balance by setting aside time for personal spirituality. I confess having something to do with the personal spirituality part as well, but again, we have gone too far. We mistakenly saw rabbinic burnout as a necessary consequence of treating one’s rabbinate as a calling, not just a profession; we demonized pulpit rabbis of the past as hierarchical bordering on egomaniacal. And we concluded that because people wanted “warm and welcoming,” that was all they wanted! Let the rabbi be their friend, calling them to personal spiritual wellness and healing.

I am for all of that: warm, welcoming, relational, spiritual, and healing. But synagogues also need to have ideas that matter. Rabbis can hold people’s hand while also holding them to account. Spiritual healing is not inconsistent with prophetic conscience. I don’t mean simplistic reiterations of newspaper op ed columns with a tag-line from Isaiah to outfit them as Jewish. I mean deeply informed discussions of the human condition, our responsibility in a world at war and a nation that is polarized and fragmented. I mean the genuine Jewish call not just to retreat into a deeper life within but to advance toward a better society without.

I teach rabbis; I love them; they are my former students, my colleagues, my best friends, and, overall, the finest human beings you will ever meet. But come on rabbis; we can do better than this. We can be the voice of an enlightened Judaism, in league with science and with God, positing purpose, promise and hope. We can raise the level of national discourse by having something worth saying ourselves – and by saying it eloquently and passionately. If we rise to the occasion, so too will our congregants, because they want something deeper from us even more than we do.

Synagogues: The Detective Story

Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman

With all due respect, and (as they say), l’havdil (quite the opposite) — I do not mean to equate the two – synagogue success is like plotting a murder. You need means, motive, and opportunity.

Means

By means, I mean the individual components that go into a successful undertaking. They are the easiest of the three to arrange, because unlike motive and opportunity, they are more readily attainable, one by one.

The most important is open-minded, eager, and even urgent rabbinic leadership. When it comes to synagogue transformation, rabbis cannot do it alone, but they can kill it all by themselves – and not through malice aforethought. All they have to do is refuse it their full support; laypeople (who have jobs to go back to) will tire of the effort; the job to which rabbis return is precisely the place where they can kill it from.

Synagogues deserve rabbis who demand excellence beyond mediocrity; who cannot abide the idea of spending an entire lifetime doing endlessly and repetitively just what they’ve always done; and who take time to deepen themselves intellectually and spiritually, so that can deepen their synagogues similarly.

Such rabbis exercise soft charisma – not the bravado of a great figure striding through the synagogue, filling it with magniloquence, but the ability to listen, to understand, and to engage congregants profoundly with ideas that matter.

The second component is lay leadership that enables rabbis to operate at their best. Synagogues need to set priorities that do not condemn rabbis to endless committee meetings at the expense of leadership and visioning. They need to value the rabbis’ need to study, read, and think.

Then too there are most board meetings where discussions are often predictable, redundant, and tiring. Board meetings should send their members home empowered, not defeated; energized, not enervated. Boards routinely handle fiduciary and governance issues (as they should); they rarely set aside important time for generative conversation – matters of mission, substance, direction, and the philosophy behind whatever the synagogue is doing.

Other “means” include a unified professional team and an efficient support network; but also financial sustainability and a physical space that furthers the spiritual well-being of the synagogue mission.

These may not be in place when synagogue transformation begins; proper transformation determines their necessity and brings them into being, after which, they become the further “means” to take the next transformative step.

Motive

Motive is harder to attain than means. Every synagogue is motivated to do something, but that “something” is usually of limited scope — purely fiduciary (balance the budget) or a matter of governance (set up a committee). Only motives that flow from generative conversation can excite to the point of claiming loyalty beyond the crisis of the moment.

Motives for Jewish community were once handed to us as unquestioned givens. What further motivation did we need when anti-Semitism was rampant; when belonging to a synagogue was just the thing to do (Jewish civic virtue, if you will); or when Judaism was an ethnic thing — a matter simply of “hanging” together over bagels, while feeling good about each other?

But we now live in a post-ethnic era. Half our congregants will be (or already are) people not born Jewish and requiring a reason to be synagogued. We now inhabit an Era of Anxious Identity, where we struggle to decide what the various parts of us are. If you are reading this, you may be an American, a New Yorker, a woman, a wife, a mother, a professional, a tennis enthusiast, a musician – and a Jew. But how much of you is the Jewish part? Enough to matter? To be decisive?

A synagogue today – indeed, religion, generally – competes for the discretionary part of our everyday loyalties. Not just our income, but our time and attention go first to those parts of who we are that we consider central: our families, then our jobs (perhaps), and then? What comes next for my hypothetical reader’s struggle to determine her identity? Tennis? She is an athlete. The concert? She is a musician. Planning a vacation? She deserves it. Or, maybe, the synagogue and the Jewish project? She is Jewish!

The Jewish project of the centuries: nothing less is at stake. Synagogues must offer a transcendent motive, without which, they exist for purely utilitarian ends, lumbering on with nothing profound to offer. Great synagogues know the point it all, and express that point unreservedly in everything they say and do. Their members know they matter.

Opportunity

The master synagogue (like the master criminal) puts it all together: the carefully constructed set of necessary means, driven by a motive so compelling that it becomes practically an obsession – a healthy obsession, in our case, the compelling need to make a better world, enhance one’s life with significance, further the Jewish project, and shape a destiny in league with God.

Contrary to popular opinion, however, opportunities rarely knock. They must be sought out. So opportunity refers to the way a synagogue assembles its means (rabbi, professional staff, board, etc.) into a smoothly functioning system that can manufacture opportunity even when none seems evident. For this task, synagogues need culture and system.

First and foremost, is synagogue culture. Many synagogues manifest a culture of conflict, stress, suspicion, blame and emergency. Their clergy and lay leaders work well together only when the chips are down, but otherwise take no risks for fear of failure. They are wary of sharing aspirations, doubts, and new ideas.

Others have cultures of mediocrity: nothing altogether new gets said or done; the loyalists who show up anyway love each other no matter what the synagogue does. No one challenges anyone to do more.

Great synagogues promote cultures of honesty, nobility and trust; of expectation and appreciation. Its members share a single compelling motive – a vision that is too important to languish.

To attain such a culture, synagogues need system — the way its individual parts (the means) communicate and work together. Time is spent building relationships. Expectations are shared with mutuality of support and certainty of vision.

Means, motive and opportunity: These are integral to great synagogues in the making.

How does one determine the proper way to keep Shabbat? I get that question regularly from Jews who do not follow halachah traditionally, but who do not consider it irrelevant, and want a means of deciding such things as whether to write or ride or use electricity then. Their dilemma arises particularly in this week’s reading, where the classic commandment to observe Shabbat is found.

Because that commandment is adjacent to discussion of building the desert sanctuary, the Rabbis interpret Shabbat work to include all items connected with that sanctuary’s sacrificial cult – 39 activities in all, including sowing and ploughing; kneading, and baking; spinning and tearing; slaughtering and writing; kindling or dousing a fire; and so on (M. Shabbat 7:2).

Liberally minded Jews often wonder about these things. Kindling fire was difficult work back then, they say, but flicking an electric switch is hardly backbreaking labor. They miss the point. While they may well decide that turning on lights is permissible for them on Shabbat, that decision can hardly be based on the amount of actual toil involved. The Rabbis’ concept of work goes much deeper than that.

The 39 forms of tabernacle work fall into four categories: baking bread (for the priests); preparing fabric (for the tabernacle’s curtains); preparing a scroll (for writing); and building (the tabernacle itself). These four, however, are part of a larger category: they are all part of the human project of building and preserving culture.

This insight arrives by applying an insight from anthropologist, Claude Levi Strauss, who noted that every human society cooks food, mandates clothing, builds and decorates homes, and transmits learning from generation to generation. This insistence on converting raw nature into cuisine, style, art, and a historical record are what make us fully human.

The rabbinic forms of work, then, are no mere laundry list of random items. They are all exemplifications of the grand human project of transforming nature into culture.

“Work” is not just going to a job or doing the housework, therefore. It is the ongoing human effort to leave our mark upon the world. This human project inevitably engages us, because it is the means of staking out our worth and, in the end, what we will be remembered for. It’s what gets us up the morning.            But at the same time, it’s what we lose sleep over. Shabbat, therefore, is the day that provides a break from the ongoing task of advancing the human project; as if God says, “I hold you responsible for perfecting my world – but not today.”

So here is how I, a liberal Jew, make Shabbat decisions. I consult halachah with seriousness; I then measure my life by its principles, but not by all its specific regulations. One such principle is to take time off from the human project. So anything connected with that project’s work and worry gets put on hold.

On Shabbat, therefore, I do not (for example) write my books, articles and columns; but I do email personal notes to friends and family. Shabbat reading can be about anything – but not connected to my research. I study Torah, but not any section on which I am writing an article. I do no errands; but I drive to synagogue, simchahs, and leisure-time activities that enhance life’s fullness.

On Shabbat, I cherish the gift of family and friends; I fill my soul with music and art, love and laughter, nature and nurture, both solitude and community. My responsibility for the human project will return soon enough, when Shabbat is over.

I have the highest regard for Jews who follow the traditional halachic guide to keeping Shabbat. But imagining just that single path to proper Shabbat observance puts Shabbat beyond the reach of those who find its halachic details unpersuasive, but who nonetheless want to honor Shabbat in a reasonable and satisfying way. This underlying principle of the Ongoing Human Project can be compelling guide to making Shabbat matter in our lives.

Way back at the burning bush (Exodus 3:6), “Moses hid his face, being afraid to look at God.” And for good reason: as God explains later (Exodus 33:20), “No one can see me and live.” Yet here (Exodus 24:10), not just Moses, but Aaron, Nadav, Abihu, and even the Israelite elders, “saw the God of Israel, yet He did not raise His hand against them.”

Why not? What exactly did they see?

Rashi says they just glanced at God; enough to deserve punishment, maybe, but not so much that God could not postpone it, to avoid marring the joy of revelation.

That’s not a great answer to our philosophically inclined commentators, who offer an alternative solution, dependent on Maimonides’ understanding of prophecy. God cannot be seen, they point out, because God is invisible. Moses and his party must, therefore, simply have intuited a prophetic vision of God, Such a vision, says Maimonides, arises out of the combination of three perfected character traits: reason, imagination and morality — precisely the three hallmarks, incidentally, that Immanuel Kant would later celebrate as the essence of humanity: pure reason, aesthetic judgment, and the moral law.

But how could all those priests and elders have attained the prophetic capacity that we reserve for Moses alone?

We should supplement Maimonides, then, with the view of Judah Hechasid, the leader of German mysticism following the Crusades. Judah composed Shir Hakavod, (“Song of Glory,” called also Anim Z’mirot) a daring anthropomorphic description of God that is still recited in traditional synagogues at the end of Musaf — as if he had actually perceived God in human form. But Judah was more sophisticated than that. He believed God has two aspects: the ultimate and hidden side that no one sees; and a “visual translation,” so to speak — an emanation from the concealed part, in knowable human form, the way a shadow of something hidden from sight might be projected upon a screen. How else can we know an unknowable God? Surely God must project at least a hint of what divinity is like.

Return now to Maimonides, for whom ultimate seeing is more than visual. All animals see; but human beings “see” prophetically. We may not all be prophets, any more than we are all brilliant philosophers, accomplished artists, and perfected moral agents, but we all experience reason, imagination, and morality to some degree. And the way we best express this higher-order “seeing” is through speech.

There are exceptions: artistic geniuses like Picasso and Beethoven who transcend pure speech in providing the imagination of greatness; but most of us speak our worlds into being. The side of the divine that God shares with us, in the philosophy of Judah Hechasid, may not be, as Judah thought, an actual sighting of God. More likely, it is the manifestation of whatever it is that prompts us to grasp for language of the divine – what we call the “sacred.”

Over 100 years ago, Emil Durkheim, the Jewish founder of modern sociology wondered where words and concepts come from. How do we get the idea of “allness,” for instance – and then words like “all,” “eternity” and “forever”? He denied the standard philosophical reasoning that attributed such ideas to the internal working of our minds, acting independently. Ideas, Durkheim insisted, are prompted by external experiences, which then evoke words – especially, Durkheim thought, the word, “sacred.”

A lesser word does not do justice to experiences like moments of love, the kindness of strangers, scientific breakthroughs , and beauty that takes the breath away. The word “sacred” arose when, from the human side, the Israelites on the mountain put together reason, imagination and morality to exercise prophetic vision; while God offered a glimpse of what those three elements might reasonably strive to comprehend.

What Moses and the Israelite leaders saw that day was not the face of God, but possibilities that demanded a new word: “sacred.” And we have been striving for it ever since.